You now have a good idea of how links can help optimize your search engine results and impact your page authority. But recent analysis shows that social media can indirectly impact your site as well. In this lesson, we'll look at how social media can help improve your SEO strategy and the importance of this being an early part of your promotion strategy. We'll look at specifically, how to use Twitter and Pinterest to maximize site results. Let's explore how social media can be part of a long-term offsite strategy. The next area we want to focus on when it comes to offsite SEO is social media. There has been a lot of analysis done over the last couple years, and a decent correlation between social media usage and higher rankings has been discovered. When looking at studies like this, it's important to note that correlation never means causation. However, the link between social media usage and rankings could mean there is an indirect influence on SEO through growing and engaging your online user base. Even without a direct influence on SEO, a good social media strategy can increase your overall brand visibility online and help earn a better reputation, allowing your site to receive more traffic. It's important to note that Google has stated they do not have an algorithm that takes specific social media factors, like followers and engagement, into account when determining your ranking. But, like any webpage, if it is accessible to Google and contains a link, this link is crawled. So, the more people that tweet a link about your website or share a link to your website on Facebook, the more opportunities Google has to discover and index pages on your site. Links and tweets and social profiles are all considered no follow links, which means they pass no authority from one site to the next. So while these may appear in your backlink profile, they are not counted as links that will boost your site authority. However, tweets are crawled and indexed. So the more people who tweet about you or your brand, the more opportunities a reference to your brand, with the link to your site, has of showing up in search results. This can increase referrals from social channels and build better brand recognition. We know from past lessons that developing a brand is important to your overall SEO strategy. And this may increase in the coming years. It takes time to build up an audience of engaged users. And because of this, social media is not only useful to SEO, but to your broader marketing and branding efforts. It's advisable to make social media an early part of your overall promotion strategy. It's also a good idea to optimize your social media profiles and properties effectively, so they can be easily discovered in search. For example, you want people searching for your brand to be able to find your website, your Twitter profile, your Facebook page, and any other social properties that may make sense with your brand, such as Pinterest. Pinterest itself offers many great SEO opportunities, as many of their pins and boards are indexed in Google and can rank highly for related search queries. There have been many times where I am researching a specific subject, only to find a Pinterest board ranking in the top five results on page one of Google. This can offer a lot of value to your business if used effectively. For example, I searched for decorating ideas for small living rooms and this is a great long-tail keyword and the Pinterest board is my fifth result. Pinterest can rank really well for long-tail niche keywords. Optimizing Pinterest boards effectively can really help to draw visitors to your site with well placed pins and useful descriptions. One thing I have noticed are boards with a lot of active followers tend to rank better in search. So this goes back to the importance of developing a healthy following with good engagement. As you can see, developing a social media presence can provide good secondary benefits to your overall SEO strategy and should be considered as part of an effective offsite SEO strategy to increase brand presence and recognition. That completes the video portion of this lesson.
